SMX West 2016 SEO Audit Tools, Tips & Tricks

15 February 2016

Last SMX East 2015, I spoke on the same topic where I shared a good list of SEO tools and their usage. Thanks for all the feedback you gave and the SMX staff shared to me the scores. From a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is the highest, I received a rating of 4.64 from the audience and probably the most common negative feedback I got was I presented too fast. I apologize for the speed, I just felt I needed to cover a lot in such a short amount of time, and my slides were saved and shared online anyway. I saw all the positive tweets and blog post where you mentioned my presentation.

This year, I am in the same session, same topic, but what is not the same is what I will present. For me to not talk as fast, I considered removing or decreasing the details of some tools that do not have much importance, or those that you can live without them, that way I can talk a bit more slower and spend more time on the other more important slides.

A few things I've added that were not in my previous presentation

Handling some of the popular JavaScript Frameworks such as AngularJS, React, Ember and more.
I mentioned tools in finding if there is an issue and some tools that can also help fix the issue.

Pagespeed Tools
Last SMX East 2015, I talked about tools to find issues with pagespeed. This time, I will also mention tools that can help optimize pagespeed.

Audience Insight Tools How to analyze your audience well. This will serve as aguide for all your future content marketing efforts.

Browser Plugins You may or may not have some of these, but I didn't mention them in my previous SMX in New York. I will mention some of the important ones used in this SMX in San Jose.

Save this URL, because after my SMX presentation, my slides will also be posted here along with any other additional notes I may wish to add.

Updated: SMX Day 2 - Presentation Day

Day 2 came and this time I believe I paced my presentation well, I was also given a bit few more time. Thanks to all your great feedback. And as promised my presentation is included and all links to all tools mentioned.

List of Tools & URLs

This was my second time to be assigned this topic/session at SMX. First was at SMX East 2015 in New York. And I have a previous list of tools that I still mentioned in my presentation this SMX West 2016. For all tools I mentioned before, you can visit my previous list here. For all new tools that were not in the old list I have, they are enumerated below:

Headless Browsers

What are they for: Headless browsers are web browsers with no user interface, but they can extract the code from a site to "view" the code how users see it. This is good to use for websites that use AJAX and many of the front-end JavaScript frameworks used today like AngularJS, React, Ember and more!

Note: Using headless browsers for prerendering client-side JavaScript is not pretty straight forward. You may need the help of a web developer if you are not one or is challenged working with server-side scripting.

Prerendering Tool

What is it for: Prerendering of a website that uses client-side JavaScript. So that the content & links can be crawled better by search engines. If running headless browsers is difficult, there is an online services, that can do this for you.

Prerender.io is a paid solution, although if your site is 250 pages or less, Prerender.io can offer this for free.

Task Runners

What are they used for: Automation of task commonly done on multiple pages. For SEO purposes, many of these automated task can be used for improving page speed, such as minifying/uglifying code, consolidating JS and CSS files, optimizing images, shortening variable name lengths, removing unnecessary comments and more.

Advanced Social Listening Tools

What is it used for: Aside from just pulling in the number of social shares, likes, tweets, etc. additional insights can be drawn from net sentiment, passion intensity, trending term associations, brand reputation, conversation drivers (people, sites and location), popular content and more.

Web Browser Plugins for Evaluating Page Quality

What are they used for: Just a good and quick easy way looking at a score to rate the quality of a page to see if the site is an ideal candidate to try to obtain a link from. Or can be used to quickly evaluate the quality of existing links.

All other tools mentioned

Thank you again

Thanks to SMX for allowing me to speak again at the best search marketing conference. It was nice speaking again with Jessie Stricchiola and it was my first time in a session together with "Annielytics" Anne Cushing. This session was moderated by Alex Bennert but her true value also comes in the preplanning she works on behind the scenes. And thanks to all the wonderful feedback from the different people I talked to at the conference during the breaks and parties after the conference days as well as in the tweets that came in.